PIONEERS AND SETTLERS: PART 1

I don't know why I started thinking about it. It was probably just where my mind took me as I walked back to work after lunch.

The sky was hot and heavy, compressing the air under its cloudy blanket. I was walking quickly, to avoid getting caught in the rain, and I was thinking about people.

There are lots of ways to categorise people, each of them imperfect and clunky. A year ago I was speculating on Ketchuppers and Gogetters - those who sit back and wait, wishing upon the stars... and those rocket-builders out there, adventuring through the cosmos until they get to where they dreamed of.

Today, I was thinking about a new distinction - Pioneers and Settlers.

Wait a mo. Isn't that the same thing, repackaged?

Perhaps. Let me explain:

A project I'm working on requires a lot of joined-up thinking. At the moment, the loud voices in the team seem unable to listen to each other, and it fascinates me as to why that is, and what the impact is upon the project. For example, I got handed a set of notes from a meeting I was at and the notes didn't remind me of the meeting at all! All the information was there, but there was something about it that convinced me that the person taking the minutes had zoned out of it, or had perceived what was going on through the prism of their own ideas... or had been at a completely different meeting.

It did occur to me (as I'm sure it just did to you) that I might have a prism of my own and that the writer was actually presenting a neutral view that I couldn't see. But even if that were the case, the point would still be the same - my perception, frame of reference and memory of the meeting did not match the documented history of the event.

In thinking about why it would be that people in the same discussion could emerge with different memories of it, I realised that something had gone wrong with our ability to communicate, and specifically, to listen.

This is where the Pioneers and Settlers come in.

Pioneers are awesome people. They see the horizon and the thought of it is exhilarating. Almost as quickly as a dream arrives, a sketchy plan follows - they'll saddle their horse, grab whatever tools they have and head out before sunset. Their eyes are always over the horizon.

Not everyone is a Pioneer though. Some of us are Settlers, and we are wonderful. We like to make a home and build a family. We like community and safety and places with running water and stories that come back from the frontier. We build and we fix and we create space for people to flourish. Our eyes are always on our surroundings.

Now, you can probably see already what happens when you've got a team of people: some will be Settlers and some will be Pioneers. Some will be pushing forward at a hundred miles an hour; others will be dreaming up braking systems.

How do you manage the tension between them?

That was the question I had, walking back to the office. How do you manage the tension in a team of Pioneers and Settlers?

I think I have a small part of the answer. I think you have to get them to realise that they need each other by thinking about the relationship between two things: (1) the 'good' and (2) the 'best'. And I'll explain more about that in Part 2.